Buckets vs Cyberduck for Amazon S3 (2026)

Verified 13 Oct 2026. This page is written by the team that makes Buckets. We have tried to be fair. Prices and features change, so check the Cyberduck and Mountain Duck sites before you decide. If something here is out of date, email buckets@serverlesscreed.com and we will fix it.

Cyberduck is the best-known free file-transfer client. Its sibling, Mountain Duck, mounts remote storage as a drive. Buckets is a paid desktop app built only for Amazon S3, CloudFront, and S3-compatible storage.

The two products start from different places. Cyberduck is a general file-transfer tool that supports S3 among many protocols. Buckets is an S3 and CloudFront console.

At a glance

	Buckets	Cyberduck / Mountain Duck
Price	14-day trial, then $5/month, $49/year, $99 lifetime, or Team at $49/seat/year (3-seat minimum)	Cyberduck is free. Mountain Duck is about $60 per year.
Protocols	Amazon S3 and S3-compatible storage. SFTP, WebDAV and FTPS servers can be mounted as a folder through rclone, but not browsed in the app.	Many protocols, including S3
Mount as a drive	Virtual Drive, which needs rclone and macFUSE / WinFsp / FUSE3 installed separately	Mountain Duck mounts natively through macOS File Provider and Windows Cloud Files
AWS sign-in	IAM Identity Center (SSO) with automatic token refresh, saved profiles, AssumeRole, the AWS CLI browser login, and a multi-account dashboard	Supports AWS profiles and SSO
CloudFront	Distributions, invalidations, Origin Access Control, signed URLs and cookies, CloudFront Functions, and folder-to-site publishing	See Cyberduck's documentation
S3 administration	Bucket policies, lifecycle, Object Lock, replication, Batch Operations, Storage Lens, IaC export	See Cyberduck's documentation
Cost visibility	Cost preview before billable operations, Cost Explorer, storage-class analysis	See Cyberduck's documentation
Recovery	Time Travel restores a prefix to an earlier point using object versions	See Cyberduck's documentation
Platforms	macOS (Apple silicon), Windows (x64), Linux (x64, arm64)	macOS and Windows
Source	Proprietary	Open source (Cyberduck)

Choose Cyberduck or Mountain Duck if…

• You need more than S3. Cyberduck browses and transfers over many protocols in one app. Buckets is built around S3: it has no FTP support, and it can only mount SFTP, WebDAV and FTPS servers as a folder through rclone, not browse them in the app.
• You want a native drive without extra installs. Mountain Duck uses the operating system's own cloud-file APIs. Buckets' Virtual Drive works, but it relies on rclone and a FUSE driver that you install separately.
• You want free. Cyberduck costs nothing. Buckets has a 14-day full trial and no free tier.
• You prefer open source.

Choose Buckets if…

• Sign-in is your daily pain. Problems with IAM Identity Center and AssumeRole sessions come up repeatedly in Cyberduck's public issue tracker (for example #13377 and #17694). Buckets runs its own SSO device flow with automatic refresh. It also runs aws login in an isolated sandbox and switches between saved accounts in one click. Try it with your own organization during the trial.
• You administer S3, not just move files. Buckets covers bucket policies, lifecycle rules, Object Lock, replication, Batch Operations, Storage Lens, a security and PII scanner, and IaC export to CDK, CloudFormation, SAM, or Terraform.
• You run sites on CloudFront. Buckets supports Origin Access Control and targeted invalidations, with a cost preview: the first 1,000 paths each month are free. It can also sign URLs and cookies, test and publish CloudFront Functions, and deploy a local folder to a private bucket behind CloudFront.
• You want to see costs before you incur them. Billable operations show an estimate and the permissions they need before they run.
• You need point-in-time recovery. Time Travel rebuilds a prefix's earlier state from retained versions and delete markers, and you review the plan before you apply it. It works from the version history S3 kept: a plan covers up to 200,000 versions and delete markers, incomplete plans are refused, and permanently deleted versions cannot be brought back.

Privacy

The Buckets desktop app has no analytics or crash-reporting SDK. AWS requests go directly from your computer to AWS. Our Trust Center lists every network connection the app makes.

Sources

• Cyberduck and Mountain Duck pricing, checked 13 Oct 2026
• Cyberduck issue tracker: #13377, #17694, #17690
• Buckets facts: pricing, documentation, Trust Center

The best test is your own workload. Download the 14-day trial and run the task you do every week.